Spira charges your phone and displays the time

Wireless chargers, while cool, have yet to really make it mainstream. Now that Apple is embracing wireless charging (finally), we're seeing interesting prototypes like the Spira. What is neat about the Spira (besides its cool name)?

For starters, it's a wall-mounted charger. First you slot your phone into a designated case and turn on the Spira app, which will show you how much charge is left on your phone. Then the phone, in its case, is then stuck onto the Spira wall charger via magnets and the phone then starts charging via induction.

Trusting design, ignoring gravity

It seems rather terrifying to just stick your phone on the wall with no placeholders in sight. Unlike glue, however, magnets will take a much longer time to wear down so it'll be a long time before the Spira's magnets get too weak to hold a phone up.

The display is unique in how it shows battery levels - displaying them in the form of white spheres that fill up your screen if fully charged. The less spheres you see, the more charge your phone needs.

What else does the Spira do? Depending on how you turn said phone, you can turn your Spira into a wall clock - the display of the phone will change the flat display of the Spira. Without a phone, the surface of the Spira looks just like a matte black circular surface. Add the phone and it morphs into an elegant display of stylised lines that meld well with the phone.

Sadly the Spira is not commercially available as it's a diploma project for student Alice Robbiani of the Switzerland institution École cantonale d'art de Lausanne (ECAL) but we can still dream of the smart people at Apple coming up with solutions just as elegant.